HeadacheWise wins Rep. Sean Casten’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’s Sixth District

When asked what inspired the creation of HeadacheWise, Maclane Zich said, “For as long as I can remember, headaches have shaped daily life for my mom and me. Some days it meant missing school. Other days, it meant watching her lie in the dark, unable to join family dinners. We both kept journals filled with symptoms and triggers, but the pages never led to answers. Each episode felt isolated, and nothing connected the dots.

“After years of seeing how little progress we made, I started thinking about creating a better system. During my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I realized how much I enjoyed coding, and the logical thinking behind programming, through my computer science classes and an online summer course. That’s when the idea of creating an app came to me. Most existing headache apps were either too time-consuming to log, did not have the visual pattern tracking needed to spot trends, or held AI insights behind expensive paywalls. I realized the problem was not that we didn’t have the information, but what we needed to do with that data. Our logs were unstructured, and human analysis was both time-consuming and limited in scope. I wanted to build something that could translate those scattered notes into insights that made sense.

“That idea became HeadacheWise. My goal was to turn a process that felt hopeless into one that utilized technology, mathematics, and statistics to provide real results. I began teaching myself app development and experimented with ways to log pain levels, triggers, and symptoms digitally. Over time, I built algorithms that could detect links between episodes and generate summaries that described likely causes of headaches, all in plain language. Integrating the Gemini API allowed the app to review user data and point out correlations among pain intensity, time of day, triggers, and related symptoms.

“Seeing how useful the early versions were for my mom was very rewarding and provided the initiative to continue. She could finally see how certain foods, stress levels, or sleep patterns affected her pain. It was the first time we both felt we were learning from the data rather than guessing.

“HeadacheWise was inspired by frustration and pain, but created through the desire for understanding and solutions. I built it to help people like my mom and me see a better picture of their health. I hope to continue advancing the app and use my skills to combine technology with healthcare to improve lives.”